Uncle Rebus Poems

Will Rawls

In 2019, the violence and risk with which language captures black life is ever more real. Public space, whether virtual or concrete, is a battleground for putting the language of oppression or resistance into the world. Also, language has sped up to a dizzying clip. I’ve been hungering for more time to ponder and construct language for public consumption, to slow language down, to pick it apart. Then I got stuck on the question: Can dance help us choose our words more carefully? I am endlessly fascinated by dance’s slippery nature that is impossible to put into words; dance makes language trip, stutter and grasp for definitions. This year I began exploring how to literally put moving bodies into contact with words, to rethink how words can unfurl the beautiful complexity of black life that is so often oversimplified in our media. In other words, how to create a space for linguistic experimentation for black dancers? How to choreograph a freer language? Uncle Rebus was born.

Collaborating with dancers Trinity Bobo, Stanley Gambucci and Jasmine Hearn, I looked into the history of Brer Rabbit Tales. The Tales are a contentious series of black oral stories, recorded and published by a white, southern folklorist, Joel Chandler Harris, who claims to have overheard the enslaved sharing them on a plantation. ‘Uncle Remus’ is a character, invented by Harris, to serve as the fictional narrator of these tales. In my mind, Remus has become a stuck symbol of black oral tradition, as seen through a white gaze. Coming out of this post-Emancipation, Reconstruction era, Zora Neale Hurston wrote that Negro expression is the “urge to adorn,” yet in the tales, these adornments had been buried by an underestimation of black poetic ingenuity, especially in mainstream literary circles. For me, the tar baby became a central figure in how to free up expression within the Tales. In one story, Brer Fox mixes up tar and turpentine and, from this material, sculpts a human figure. Brer Fox sets Tar Baby in the hot sun, a black and sticky trap waiting to snare Brer Rabbit. Much can be said about this black figure, its amorphous body, wrapped in silence, but, I began wondering: What can tar baby say? Could we invent a language that tar baby can offer, a language we haven’t encountered yet? A language that helps us reimagine our roles as storytellers and dancers? Can this language dance like our bodies?

I printed two standard English alphabets on A4 paper and attached them to a wall. The dancers and I rearranged these letters for weeks to spell out sentences from Brer Rabbit Tales. Letter by letter, building up and breaking down the words of Uncle Remus, we discovered new associations, fractured ideas and multiple voices. This abundance offered me both a complex unspooling of black oral history and, in this age of texting and typos, a window onto our contemporary linguistic leanings. We also explored how punctuation could substitute for letters as a simple, visual adornment. For example, this would turn the word “TAR” into the word “T#R”. These substitutions created hybrid image-words that made me question what was being written, what I was reading into it all, and through this process, what imaginary wor(l)ds and political commentaries were emerging.

I’m contributing the written recordings of our structured spelling improvisations for this journal. I’ve tried to faithfully recreate how the words transitioned into other words while spreading out across the surface of the wall, in their own kinetic, grammatical journeys. A “rebus” is a mind puzzle, where the reader tries to piece together a collection of images and letters into a statement. I’ve always like the nonsense and play involved in guessing what the answer is. I enjoy this more than knowing the answer. My hope is that Uncle Rebus allows the same kind of free read. Our library is open.